Text page
30 Years after Les Immatériaux Art, Science, and Theory
"30 Years after Les Immatériaux Art, Science, and Theory" belongs to the public history line where accelerationism is sorted into usable branches, slogans, and retrospective explanations.
Archive condition
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Core idea
These pages matter because accelerationism is the archive's most overused public keyword. The site needs a cluster that distinguishes history, primer, and public explanation from the doctrine-like certainty that later reception often projects onto the term.
Primers and histories do the work by sorting competing branches, periodizations, and origin stories. They organize a noisy field into public maps that can be argued over, revised, or contested.
That matters because later debates about accelerationism often begin by flattening distinct projects into one thing. This cluster keeps the section anchored in branch logic, genealogy, and disagreement rather than slogan inflation.
How to read this text
Read first for what version of accelerationism the page is naming or periodizing before following its judgment about the movement.
Track how the page distinguishes origins, branches, or public uses. Those distinctions are usually more important than the headline verdict.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 22
236 30 Years after Les Immatériaux to regret the mistakes he made in the wake of his departure from the party line. Lyotard’s key point here – one echoed by many critics of contemporary accelerationism – is that the accelerationist error consists in a failure to draw a distinction between two types of the inhuman: The inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of development … must not be confused with the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage.
Definition · paragraph 2
Finally, I ask whether the ques- tion of “accelerationism” emerging in contemporary philosophy today (which is strongly linked to a certain turn in Lyotard’s thinking at the time of Les Immatériaux) might provide a way to reorient the impulse of Les Immatériaux outside of what have now become institutional constraints. Immaterials Today In the 1990s, working with a colony of narcoleptic dogs that had been bred in captivity for several generations in a r
Definition · paragraph 24
And, as Chaput declares: The proposition of Les Immatériaux is … to make felt, to show, troubled- ness, inquietude and madness.71 Lyotard’s accelerationism was really about the acknowledgement of the end of the human project understood as a project of will, as the collective project of enlightenment.
History · paragraph 9
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration 223 dormant for a few years before eventually becoming the site of a “polyvalent cultural complex”, a “City of Science and Industry”, including a new National Museum of Science and Technology, the Cité de la Musique, and other cultural centres: in effect, an early “cultural theme park”.
History · paragraph 13
The CCI was finally closed down a few years after Les Immatériaux, so that the show can be seen at once as its one signal achievement, and, as Anthony Hudek has suggested,36 also as a “hinge” in the history of the Pompidou itself; at once the point at which its ideal cross-disciplinary post-museum status was effectively achieved, and the last exhibition in which that ideal would be seriously pursued.
Appears in sections
Accelerationism Branches and Debates Primary section
Left, right, unconditional, and popularized accelerationisms sorted into a cleaner research map.